Microfluidics refers to the use of soft lithography and replica molding of elastomeric materials in order to form very small scale fluid and control channels. Multilayer microfluidics uses soft lithography and replica molding to form one or more sets of flow and control layers, which are aligned on top of each other in the final device.
An existing method of microfluidic sorting uses fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS). FACS relies on using a fluorescence detector in combination with an applied electric field to perform the cell sorting task. This technology is too slow for some applications where it is desired to count and sort very large numbers of droplets in a very short time.